Review: Never Look Away Falters in Forcing Beauty into the Truth

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film prioritizes the sentimental over the true, the tidy moral over the messy reality.

Never Look Away
Photo: Caleb Deschanel/Sony Pictures Classics

Like his Oscar-winning The Lives of Others from 2006, filmmaker Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s latest, Never Look Away, is an attempt to stage a version of the disasters of 20th-century Germany that, if not quite redemptive, offers catharsis and meaning in a story ostensibly devoid of them. And just as The Lives of Others relied on a misleading historical fabrication—there’s no evidence that even a single Stasi agent ever betrayed his or her duties in order to aid the subjects they were monitoring—Never Look Away also prioritizes the sentimental over the true, the tidy moral over the messy reality.

The film posits artistic creation as a means of reconciliation, centering its story around a painter, Kurt Barnert (Tom Schilling), loosely based on the artist Gerhard Richter, who’s struggling to process the manifold tragedies of midcentury Germany. (Although he’s thanked in the credits, Richter has distanced himself from the film, saying it “abuse[s] and grossly distort[s]” his biography.) As the film opens in 1938, Barnert is a small child living outside of Dresden in the east of Germany. His beloved aunt, Elisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl), takes him to one of the “degenerate art” exhibitions the Nazis organized to propagate their claim that Germany’s flourishing prewar avant-garde art scene was either an attempt by communists and Jews to agitate the German Volk, or an outgrowth of genetically inherited mental instability. Barnert’s family, however, aren’t committed Nazis: “I like them,” Elisabeth mischievously whispers about the paintings to Kurt, as a Nazi official drones on about their worthlessness.

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Elisabeth is soon designated as “worthless,” after a schizophrenic episode in which Kurt finds her stripped naked, ranting to no one in particular, and hitting herself with a heavy ashtray. In the film, this figures as the originating trauma, or the Freudian “primal scene,” which Kurt will attempt to process both in his art and love life. After the war, he will eventually marry a woman named Elisabeth (Paula Beer) who bears a strong resemblance to his lost aunt, and even woos her by improvising a cardboard ashtray for her to use. Responsible for Aunt Elisabeth’s death is the SS gynecologist Carl Seeband (Sebastian Koch, taking the villain role here after playing the hero in The Lives of Others), who puts the troubled young woman on the extermination list after she resists her forced sterilization.

After Elisabeth is marked for death and the film flashes forward to the end of the war, Never Look Away mostly goes off the rails. In a cross-cut sequence set to a mournful, operatic song and presented through cinematographer Caleb Deschanel’s warm, glossy images, von Donnersmarck interlaces the notorious destruction of Dresden by Allied bombers with the gas-chamber execution of Elisabeth and other disabled women. The representation of the latter is nothing short of exploitative, a cheap manipulation that subordinates history to romantic abstraction. Von Donnersmarck, who’s also responsible for the film’s screenplay, has a woman with Down syndrome naively tell the camp nurse about to execute her, “I like you,” and the nurse responds in kind, an unnecessary contrivance that feels all the more artificial for the lachrymose opera playing on the soundtrack. The viewer is then subjected to a handheld shot from within the chamber, picturing the woman and others choking to death and collapsing. All the while, Deschanel’s camera stays focused on the conventionally beautiful Elisabeth, as the blurry forms behind her retch and expire. Never look away, indeed.

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The question isn’t only why the filmmakers chose to present this scene in such a transparently manipulative way, but also why the scene is necessary at all. What follows, after the end of the war, is a melodrama centered around Kurt’s travails and triumph, full of gimmicky coincidences and hollow correspondences. His life, of course, will intersect with Seeband’s in a manner that will surprise only those viewers still hopeful that the film will show respect for their intelligence. The scene in the showers becomes all the more gratuitous in retrospect, an example of the misery-wallowing that the film returns to when it emphasizes images—such as the corner of Seeband’s office where Elisabeth cowered as she resisted her sterilization order—that cannot have any significance to Kurt, who knows far less than we do.

As Kurt rises to prominence in the GDR, escapes to the West, and rises again to acclaim in the West German city of Düsseldorf, the characters he encounters speak to him in slogans which will recur throughout the film. Both the English title of the film and the German (Werk ohne Autor, which translates to “work without author”) are named for separate lines spoken multiple times by characters that encapsulate far less than the film thinks they do. But the slogan that Never Look Away appears to adopt as its own artistic mantra is “everything that is true is beautiful,” which originates as an expression intoned by Aunt Elisabeth before she’s carted off to be, one supposes, beautifully murdered. The film’s embrace of such an empty catchphrase about beauty almost serves as a self-critique, for in attempting to force beauty into the truth, this film unintentionally exposes itself as both false and ugly.

Score: 
 Cast: Tom Schilling, Sebastian Koch, Paula Beer, Saskia Rosendahl, Oliver Masucci  Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck  Screenwriter: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck  Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics  Running Time: 188 min  Rating: R  Year: 2018  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Pat Brown

Pat Brown teaches Film Studies and American Studies in Germany. His writing on film and media has appeared in various scholarly journals and critical anthologies.

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